Manicurists and Pedicurists Salary and Pay

The national wage ladder (BLS OEWS, May 2024)

Percentiles answer the question a single average cannot: where would a given Manicurists and Pedicurists offer sit among all 147,820 workers doing this job? The survey top-codes at $239,200+ and withholds unreliable cells, shown as n/p in the table.

Employment and concentration

The occupation employed 147,820 people in May 2024, 0.10% of every job BLS counted. California is the largest employer at 37,730 jobs, and the leading three states between them hold 46.0% of the workforce. Concentration peaks in Connecticut, whose location quotient of 2.74 says this work is 2.74 times as dense there as it is nationwide.

The spread matters as much as the center. Earners at the 90th percentile make $47,990, which is 1.7 times the $27,910 at the 10th, a difference of $20,080 annually. Because the mean wage ($36,910) sits above the median ($34,660), a typical offer should be judged against the median and the 25th to 75th percentile band, not the mean.

Pay by state

Every state with a publishable estimate is in this table, 49 of them, sorted by jobs. The pay leader by median is Kentucky at $60,950; the jobs leader is California:

The occupation in context

Ranked against all 826 published occupations, Manicurists and Pedicurists stands number 208 by employment and number 795 by median pay. Inside its own major group, Personal Care and Service Occupations, the group median wage is $37,320 across 32 detailed occupations, so this occupation pays 7% less than its group median, and it supplies 4.7% of the group's 3,159,920 jobs. In 26 of the 49 states with a published median, the state median beats the national median of $34,660, which is the single best quick test of whether this occupation's pay is set nationally or locally: a high count means local markets regularly outbid the national figure.

Metropolitan areas: where the jobs and the pay sit

New York-Newark-Jersey City, NY-NJ is the largest metro employer with 23,850 jobs, 16.1% of the national total. Below, the biggest employers come first; the pay table after it only counts metros with 500 or more jobs in the occupation, so its leader is a real market and not a statistical artifact.

Largest metro employers

Highest-paying metros (500+ jobs)

At the other end, Pittsburgh, PA posts the lowest mean pay among metros with at least 500 jobs, $28,320 a year, against $49,700 in Cleveland, OH. Anyone relocating for this work should price the destination metro's table row, not the national median, before signing anything.

What the median pay looks like as a budget

The median Manicurists and Pedicurists paycheck, gross, is $1,333 every two weeks on an annual $34,660, which is $2,888 a month and $667 a week. Moving from the 25th percentile ($31,510) to the 75th ($37,660) is worth $6,150 a year, which is the realistic size of the experience and specialization premium inside this occupation. Gross is a starting point, not a budget: the paycheck calculator nets it down by state, an offer comparison lives in the salary calculator, and the raise vs inflation calculator separates a real raise from a nominal one.

To place a real offer: a salary of $38,126 would sit between the median ($34,660) and the 75th percentile ($37,660), inside the top half but outside the top quarter of this occupation's ladder. An offer at the 25th percentile, $31,510, is $3,150 under the median, the typical size of the discount attached to entry-level or low-cost-market postings in this field.

Related occupations in Personal Care and Service Occupations

Sibling occupations in Personal Care and Service Occupations: Funeral Attendants, Morticians, Undertakers, and Funeral Arrangers, First-Line Supervisors of Gambling Services Workers, Animal Trainers, Barbers, Locker Room, Coatroom, and Dressing Room Attendants. Medians there are computed identically, so the comparison is apples to apples; the full set lives on the Careers hub.